Mergers & Acquisitions Internship (Manda) in Leeds

Requirements

• You're interested in M&A, FinTech, or building things from scratch, and you want to do all three at once.
• Most importantly, you're smart, motivated, humble, and have a growth mindset.
• You are need-driven. You take whatever is in front of you and move it forward, whether that's fixing a broken spreadsheet, calling a vendor, or cleaning up CRM data. You don't wait to be told what's important.
• You are financially literate. You can read a P&L and a balance sheet, spot what's odd, and ask the question that surfaces the real story behind the numbers.
• You are tech-curious. You bring your own stack, you're already using AI tools to multiply your output, and you treat any manual workflow you see as a candidate for automation.
• You are a clear communicator. M&A runs on trust. You write professional emails, you're not afraid to pick up the phone, and you can hold a conversation with a 60-year-old business owner about the company they spent 30 years building.
• Available for a full-time, off-cycle placement of up to 6 months.
• Strong academic background, open to all disciplines though Finance, Economics, or Business preferred.
• Any experience, projects, or initiatives that show genuine M&A, FinTech, or entrepreneurial interest. We care more about evidence of initiative than a polished CV.
• Bonus: experience working with SME data, financing, or M&A workflows.

What the job involves

• We're looking for an M&A Intern to join manda, iwoca's M&A platform. This is a paid off-cycle internship of up to 6 months, with the intention to convert into a full-time analyst role.
• Manda is where AI meets Mergers & Acquisitions. Over the last months we've built an unbeatable proposition for the UK market of buying and selling small businesses, and our pipeline is growing rapidly across both sell-side and buy-side.
• Most M&A firms shy away from the sub-£10m EV segment because information asymmetry, lack of knowledge, and low transaction sizes make it hard to serve profitably.
• Your edge as an intern: you'll work on live sub-£10m transactions from week one, not pitch books for deals you'll never touch.
• You'll see the full deal lifecycle (origination, diligence, execution, close) inside a venture small enough that the work you do moves the business, and you'll have AI and automation as leverage rather than as a side project.
• You'll sit inside the manda Deal Team and work directly with the people running the platform: our sell-side and buy-side Transaction Managers, our Due Diligence Manager, and the Venture Lead.
• The team is small enough that you'll be in the room for real decisions on live deals, and the tooling we use (CRM, VDR, AI automated workflows) is being built in parallel by the same people you'll be working alongside.
• The internship is split into two phases to give you both breadth across the deal engine and depth on a project you own.

Phase 1: Core M&A Operations (first 2 months). You'll be embedded into one or more of our live workstreams depending on deal flow and team priorities. You'll do real day-to-day work supporting the team where it matters most. Likely placements include:

• Sell-side execution: supporting our sell-side Transaction Managers across the deal lifecycle. Qualifying inbound and outbound vendor leads, preparing materials, populating Virtual Data Rooms, and coordinating buyer Q&A.
• Buy-side execution: supporting our buy-side Transaction Manager managing the live pipeline of searchers and acquirers. Qualifying buyer mandates, matching them to live sell-side opportunities, and helping move deals through to LOI.
• Due diligence support: working with our DD Manager on company valuation and diligence for live sell-side mandates. Turning raw SME data into clear reports on business model, financial position, and fair valuation.
• Origination: identifying SMEs likely to sell, running our "likely seller" models against iwoca's customer base, and converting matches into mandates.
• Product, data & AI: turning manual workflows into automated ones, mapping the data schema for our "Digital IM", and building AI-enabled tooling that gives our Transaction Managers leverage. You'll work closely with the Venture Lead on this.

Phase 2: The project (months 3-6). Once you've built the foundation, you'll scope a project with the Venture Lead to solve a real problem or seize an opportunity you've identified during Phase 1. You'll spend the rest of the internship executing it end-to-end with full ownership and regular check-ins. Past examples of the kind of project we'd back: a model that scores acquisition targets against a buyer's mandate, an AI workflow that drafts a first-pass IM from raw accounts, or a structured outbound channel into a new vendor segment.